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Marble Fountain
- TealMyEal 11mo agoI would pay silly money for one of those things on my desk
- matthewfcarlson 11mo agoThis is absolutely brilliant
- dbacar 11mo ago"ramble about marbles" nice one!
- xnx 11mo agoStupendous project and video as well! The music is very complementary.
- kwa32 11mo ago[dead]
- neomantra 11mo agoAmazing on so many levels!! Thank you also for including the source.
- Levitz 11mo agoMesmerizing and beautiful in a simple way, I really like this type of thing.
- foltik 11mo agoBe sure to turn on sound for maximum mesmerization.
- CGMthrowaway 11mo agoMesmerizing is the right word. "I can watch them for hours" was the key bit for me - I have always been fascinated how humans can stare at a random visual generator for forever, if it's the right one. I think there is an instinct built deep in our lizard brain somewhere for this. Humans will happily stare at a fire, or an ocean, or a wave in a river, or (sometimes, especially children) a TV screen - and all I have worked out why is because it is constantly changing in an unpredictable way. This marble run shouldn't even be unpredictable - clearly the paths are fixed and the cadence of balls is regular - but somehow it is still mesmerizing.
- ecountry 11mo agoThis is magical. Thanks for sharing!
- wxce 11mo agoBeautiful, I wonder what kind of craziness would be possible with this, at scale. Whole buildings being printed and assembled block by block. Real life Minecraft, if you will
- temp0826 11mo agoAre procedurally generated rollercoasters a thing?
- sergiotapia 11mo agoBlame! is a manga where in the future humans have robots that build, and are controlled by people with Net Terminal Genes. Something happens and those humans die leaving the robots building non-stop procedurally for eons. By the time our protagonist moves about in the world, its said the Megastructure reaches from Earth all the way to Jupiter. Also, the movie Fracture features these cool marble machines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-v6E9H6nh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-v6E9H6nh0 Back when movies were made with unique good scripts and not marvel slop.
- stavros 11mo agoWhere did they get the material for it?
- sergiotapia 11mo agoThey never really specify beyond the planets themselves being consumed wholesale. Some of the structures are just hollow spheres: https://preview.redd.it/7tvkbj5bp2hb1.jpg?width=1951&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bd021469b4a948f084851197f7e1e342dd95caef https://preview.redd.it/7tvkbj5bp2hb1.jpg?width=1951&format=... Also conceivable that meteors etc crash into the megastructure providing it with endless resources.
- 9dev 11mo agoThere are serious efforts and working prototypes of printing houses. This works surprisingly well, allows construction in days instead of months, and shows a lot of promise. It’s a great rabbit hole to fall into!
- lloydatkinson 11mo agoI wish there was a write up of how some of the code works. There's a lot of Python in the repo. Looks fascinating, seems to use Python to generate OpenSCAD code, I think.
- WillMorr 11mo agoIt's specifically using SolidPython2 to generate the models. I originally wanted to do a quick code cleanup and have the specific math be much clearer but by the time it was working that was an absolutely massive undertaking. If I touch the code again I'm probably going to refactor the entire codebase and use a different 3D engine.
- fogleman 11mo agoWhat did you not like about the SolidPython2 / OpenSCAD approach? What would you want from a different "3D engine" for this?
- WillMorr 11mo agoMostly speed, I'm mostly doing large boolean unions of primitives or chain hulls and OpenSCAD chugs pretty good at large numbers of operations. Don't get me wrong, they're great tools for what they're good at. I need to do more research before I start a port, SDFs seem like the best option but I'm not 100% confident. I am considering using your SDF library though (github.com/fogleman/sdf) but need do do some experimenting/benchmarking first.
- timmg 11mo agoNot sure if this matters for you or not, but my understanding (with some experiments) is that the "slicers" implicitly do a union. As in: you could have an STL with a bunch of overlapping blobs and the 3d printer slicing code just checks isInside -- which is effectively a union. At least that's what I found when I was generating STLs in code.
- CasperH2O 11mo ago
- collingreen 11mo agoThis is cool! Great job on the video - Simple voiceover, synced music, and the fountain speaks for itself. Bravo.
- MomsAVoxell 11mo agoThis is beautiful. It would be amazing to have the tracks encode/decode audio, you know? Like, the track of the marble can be used to generate different frequencies...
- amenghra 11mo agoThere's a Tom Scott music about a musical road in California: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef93WmlEho0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef93WmlEho0
- WillMorr 11mo agoI actually attempted this, the idea of a python script that converts a midi track into a marble run is just too good to not try. I printed a large drum with different track structures inside so I could test various "slopes" by changing the speed and it just doesn't work, the balls bounce around too much to get an audible pitch. A less rigid material or a larger bearing would likely work better but I decided to focus on getting the normal version working well.
- smusamashah 11mo agoDid you try changing thickness of rails instead of bumps to produce different sounds?
- m_kos 11mo agoI am not surprised you tried given your earlier project :) https://hackaday.com/2022/09/25/this-found-sound-organ-was-made-with-python-and-a-laser-cutter/ https://hackaday.com/2022/09/25/this-found-sound-organ-was-m... Maybe at the bottom your marbles could land on surfaces with different accustic properties. Track selection would determine the surface and release time would determine the timing.
- aitchnyu 11mo agoIs the banking of the curve for a specific velocity?
- stevage 11mo agoIt says that the banking is intentionally excessive.
- LandStander 11mo agoThis is a great example of a good use case for 3D printers. The smooth marble run action combined with the interwoven organic forms would be a huge PITA to fabricate with any other method I can think of, even if your just making one.
- stavros 11mo agoA good use case for 3D printers is random, small, custom household items that greatly increase my quality of life, much more than it is a unique sculpture.
- cissou 11mo agoWhat printer do you use for that and are you happy about it?
- gaudystead 11mo agoI'm not the person you asked, but depending on what kinds of quality of life improvements you're looking for, your budget, your 3D design abilities, and your tolerance for working on the printer versus printing with it, the answer will vary in terms of what works for you. If you're casually interested, the Bambu Lab A1 combo will do most things you'd want it to do, fairly reliably, but with a closed ecosystem. If you want something more robust, go for a Prusa, but be ready for a more hands on experience. If you want an entirely customized bespoke with a high learning curve, go for a Voron.
- jstanley 11mo agoIf you want something more open source go for a Prusa. I don't buy that a Prusa is more robust than a Bambu. I used to have a Prusa Mini and now have a Bambu X1C and it is a world of difference. I would never go back.
- deaux 11mo agoReally curious to hear a few of these!
- eschluntz 11mo agoVery cool! I've designed a lot of Hilbert Curve marble tracks, using OpenSCAD and python
- WillMorr 11mo agoThat sounds super interesting, do you have a link?
- gaudystead 11mo agoNot the person you asked, but look up "Hilbert Curve" on Thingiverse, Printables, or Thangs and I bet you'll find somebody who uploaded a marble run with more information for you.
- CasperH2O 11mo agoSmall world, I opted for a Gosper curve myself, but when it got too big, cut out specific pieces and connected those. It gives everything a uniform look while allowing to fill the space in a different way.
- fHr 11mo agoso cool!
- CasperH2O 11mo agoThis is really quite interesting and similar to a project I'm working on. I've been using procedural generation to generate a marble dexterity track similar to a Perplexus. My tools are mainly Python, the Build123D library and a 3D printer.
- cyrusradfar 11mo agoI appreciate the work. It's really beautiful and checks so many of my "oddly satisfying" boxes as a builder. It seems it hit those for you too, obviously. Separately, the timing of seeing this is uncanny. I've been using marble runs to explain probability to my kids and was filming a marble run conversion lesson. Seeing this at the top of HN felt like someone was reading my minds.
- rwmj 11mo agoIs it printed / sintered in metal?
- hinkley 11mo agoLooks like fiber infused filament.
- randyrand 11mo agoI wonder if you could get it to run silently, or close to it.
- hinkley 11mo agoThat guy who makes marble music recently worked out a ball funnel that uses inserts in a different material to eat most of the noise. But in that case it’s also eating momentum as well so I’m not sure how that would work for this design. Maybe some bushings in the supports to reduce harmonics.
- bigiain 11mo agoNow my brain is doing it's usual "over complicate things to the extent a project cannot possibly get started" thing"... Active noise cancelling. Vibration detectors on oscillating parts of the track with LRAs or similar actively driving opposing vibrations. Might be able to use whatever the cheap active noise cancelling electronics headphones have? Might be able to use a high speed camera and video motion amplification to work out the best places to deploy it?
- hinkley 11mo agoHow you mount things matters a lot, and adjusting shapes to prevent harmonics might be something this guy could add to his algorithm. I saved a couple friends in college from getting into fights with their downstairs neighbors by finding them milk crates to set their speakers on so the bass doesn’t all end up in the floor. Isolating from the base or making the base of TPU could likely help.
- kazinator 11mo agoDesigners of marble fountains who don't use computing to design the paths run into reliability issues: sometimes balls derailing out of their track. They have to observe the contraption, identify problems (balls getting jammed up or jumping out) and then guess at the root causes and make manual adjustments. That's the thing here: he has it running for hours presumably without any ball jumping out. Most of the tracks consist of two rails, so the ball has two contact points. I'm no physicist but it seems like the goal would be to have ideally nearly equal forces at the two contact points at all times during the ball's descent. In other words, the track has to be perfectly banked so that the gravity and centripetal acceleration vector are balanced by a normal vector perpendicular to the rails. During a derailment, the ball has to lift away from one of the two contact points, so the normal force must have dropped to zero.
- WillMorr 11mo agoIt's actually much weirder than that: banking changes the axis of rotation and thus kills the rotational inertia. The tracks bank super aggressively in order to prevent the ball from accelerating too much and hopping the track. This is part of why the descent is so smooth and all the balls move at more or less the same speed. Also to be fair the final system does lose a ball every 30ish minutes. The tuning was largely me staring at the run or taking a video trying to catch where they get lost. Instead of hand tuning I would just update the generator and print another one. I'm considering closing the loop with a camera but that would be a whole new project.
- sixtyj 11mo agoFor roller coasters there is a software for simulation. It is imho similar situation compared with balls in your Marble Fountain https://www.nolimitscoaster.com/ https://www.nolimitscoaster.com/ First, I thought about Ansys or CATIA software but I couldn’t find any module specialized for simulation of balls. But I think that people from those companies could help as well and participate in simulation as an interesting usecase. (These software are expensive for personal projects.)
- 11mo ago
- hinkley 11mo agoMaybe it’s the color and this would look better in a brighter shade, but I hate it. It looks wrong. Malignant.
- hinkley 11mo agoI bet this would look baller with green rails and brown supports. Also might help with losing the balls visually as they get to the bottom. The visual noise makes them harder to track.
- underdeserver 11mo agoIt looks like Bones from Hades 2. Beautiful, and super cool.
- bix6 11mo agoSuper cool! I would love to see a white / clear one with LEDs. Rainbow road :)
- Taek 11mo agoWhite/clear is just a matter of picking filament, I'm not sure LEDs would be easy to incorporate into the build
- WillMorr 11mo agoI've actually done clear prints with LEDs installed. The bottom is much brighter than the top and it just look kinda tacky. I briefly hollowed out the supports and tried running fiber optics but it didn't help much. I'm realizing now that I tried a lot of weird shit during this project that just did not work at all or make it into the final product, I should do another video just of all my failed abomination marble runs.
- gaudystead 11mo agoPlease do! Also just some footage of the machine running from specific angles for a few minutes would be lovely! Nice work! :)
- timmg 11mo agoMinor suggestion/request: would be great if you added a final STL file to the github repo of a working example. Might be easier for people to try if they can't get the python code running on Linux. (I haven't tried yet. But I'd love to just send an STL to my printer to see how well it prints.)
- ashepp 11mo agoStl?
- titanomachy 11mo agoThe particle simulation approach to generating an organic "tree-like" support structure is super creative! If I'm understanding correctly, you defined some laws of physics and then ran a simulation with the "time" dimension mapped to the z-axis? Is this a well-known approach, or something you came up with? Either way, it produces a beautiful aesthetic. I'd love to play around with this idea.
- WillMorr 11mo agoThat's pretty much it! It's the simplest method of supports I could come up with that allows for robust keepout zones. I did have a bunch of issues at first with supports blocking the path but with a little tuning it became surprisingly consistent. I doubt I'm the first to come up with it but I have not seen any similar systems. Thank you! The emergent forms are much more interesting than they have any right to be for such a simple system.
- froh 11mo ago> The emergent forms are much more interesting than they have any right to be for such a simple system. hehe I wonder if this is how evolution in nature "comes up with" beauty :-D
- ljsprague 11mo agoGorgeous!
- ljsprague 11mo agoWhy isn't the top-down footprint a square?
- Romanulus 11mo ago[dead]
- codr7 11mo agoUp next: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvUU8joBb1Q
- 3oil3 11mo agoJust wow.
- ch_fr 11mo agoAwesome project, I love to read about all kinds of different procedural generation approaches!
- ashanoko 11mo ago[dead]
- worldmerge 11mo agoWill this is incredible! I’ve been learning openscad and making 3d models with it using python and this is such an inspiration. Check out the latest nightly version of openscad it’s significantly faster, like seconds vs multiple minutes on my exports.
- frenchie4111 11mo agoThis is awesome! I'd love to print one for my office. Any chance there is an stl around I can print without having to get the script running?
- chrisofspades 11mo ago!play